


The Party's Crashing Us

by Jackalope80



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV), Twilight (Movies)
Genre: Crossover, F/F, Fix-It, Fluff, Football, High School, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Pool & Billiards, Underage Drinking, Vampires, autumn vibes, i just want nice things for Vicki OK, soft lesbians
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:40:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25885984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackalope80/pseuds/Jackalope80
Summary: A fix-it fic where vampire Vicki Donovan lives and falls in love with the new kicker for the football team, Bella Swan
Relationships: Jeremy Gilbert/Annabelle "Anna" Zhu, Vicki Donovan/Bella Swan, Vicki Donovan/Damon Salvatore, Vicki Donovan/Stefan Salvatore
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	1. You're Such a Mystery

Vicki sighed as she flopped into her seat in fourth period algebra and unzipped her bookbag. Becoming a vampire had a lot of perks, she had to admit: superhuman strength, ability to party all night without a hangover, occasionally compelling her way out of detention. Unfortunately it hadn’t done shit to fix her boy problems, and it hadn’t made sitting through algebra on a gorgeous fall day any easier. She twisted her daylight ring in anticipation, a small opal set in a silver band that her mom had given her for Christmas last year, and wished she could spend the afternoon sunbathing and reading trashy magazines instead of going straight from school to the grill and then home to do homework. Who knew becoming a vampire would make her so boring and wholesome?

While she brooded over her boring afterschool plans, she noticed idly a girl she’d never seen before walking in the door and looking around in hesitation before taking the seat catty-corner from Vicki. The girl had short wavy hair parted deep on one side, and she wore a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, faded jeans, and white Converse high tops. Vicki caught herself smiling as her gaze traveled over the girl’s hands, with long graceful fingers that fidgeted nervously with a mechanical pencil.

“Hello class,” said their algebra teacher, a wiry woman in her fifties with dyed red hair. “I want you all to welcome Bella Swan, who just moved here from Oregon. She’s going to join us for the rest of the year. I hope you all can make her feel at home here in Mystic Falls.” Vicki glanced at the new girl, who half-turned to face the room and gave everyone a small wave as a few smart-asses chorused Hi Bella in singsongy voices. Vicki felt a surprising wave of compassion for her; you could tell she was used to being the tough girl, had probably moved around more than once and been through this whole rigamarole before. She was probably tired of being stared at, tired of making new friends, tired of being an outsider. Maybe even tired of being tough, not that you’d know it to look at her. Bella’s right toe in its sneaker tapped the linoleum floor erratically, but that was the only hint that she wasn’t the stoic butch girl she looked like. 

Vicki tried to concentrate on algebra instead of staring at the new girl. Bella glanced at her once or twice during class, but her face stayed impassive. Vicki was still amused at this version of herself who now cared about schoolwork; she tried to tell herself the new girl’s nervously tapping sneaker was the only thing distracting her, but that was a lie. She might be the new reformed Vicki who made good grades and didn’t do drugs, but that didn’t stop her mind from wandering to some places that would have seemed unthinkable six months ago.

Ever since becoming a vampire last year, Vicki noticed she wanted sex a lot. Which was weird because she was also slowly coming to realize she’d never really enjoyed it, at least never with another person. Tyler didn’t know he’d been her first when they got together last year. He’d always thought of her as his dirty little secret and she’d let him, because at first she’d liked the way he let his guard down around her, became so passionate and abandoned. This is the real Ty, she’d thought wonderingly as he nestled onto her shoulder afterward and fell asleep, his dark eyelashes brushing his cheeks and his muscular chest rising and falling. No one else got to see him this vulnerable, surely. That had to mean something, right? 

That’s what she’d thought at the time, and that was why she’d put up with him for so long. He’d blown her off at school more times than she could count, and when they did see each other -- always in private, and always on his schedule -- for every time he held her and told her he loved her and fell asleep afterward in her arms, there was another time he refused to look her in the eye and only stayed afterward long enough to shower her scent off. Those times were the worst, lying in bed still smelling of his sweat, listening to the water running and wondering who Tyler was getting clean for. His parents? His friends? Another girl? Not that it mattered -- there was no one in Tyler’s life she was good enough for. She had to be kept a secret from everyone, even his despised father and his boorish football teammates. That was always when Vicki resolved to tell Tyler no the next time he called. She’d make her decision, wondering how she ever let it get this far, and in the meantime he’d come back from the shower with his hair dripping and his shoulders gleaming, and he’d get dressed with his back turned to her and she’s snort with derision -- how fucking typical of him to turn his back on her now that he’d gotten what he wanted, as if their transactional romance didn’t go both ways. 

Her resolve typically lasted anywhere from three days to a couple of weeks. There were so many times she truly thought she’d kicked the Tyler habit. Over the summer she’d gone twelve whole days without seeing him or thinking of him -- she’d worked nearly every day while his family was on vacation at their beach house in the Outer Banks, and she’d felt good for the first time in months. She’d come home from work and watch a movie with Matt, or she’d go to a party at the lake with her coworkers and drink beers around a campfire. On her days off she raided her mom’s stash of Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels, eating cheese and crackers and reading paperbacks in a decrepit lawn chair in the sun, and even that was better than being with Tyler. For the first time she’d felt like she was getting to know herself, what she was really like without a guy, and it was scary but also nice.

That’s when Jeremy barged in and ruined everything. He came to the Grill with his stoner friends one night when she was working. All three of them looked completely bombed, but there was something about Jeremy that reminded her of a wounded puppy. She’d gone over to take their drink order, gently shaking off his friend’s request for a margarita since she knew all three of them from school, and Jeremy had gazed up at her with a look of such abject longing that her heart broke a little. She knew about the car accident a few weeks before but she didn’t connect it to this hollow-eyed kid -- she just thought he was coming down from a bad trip, so she took pity on him and brought his table their biggest order of deluxe nachos and three Cokes, telling her manager to put it on her own tab for the night. It was dumb, she’d known that even then, before she found out why Jeremy looked so haunted, but she couldn’t help it -- she’d always liked taking in strays. 

Of course later it turned out that Jeremy was casually selling off his dead parents’ stash of prescription painkillers, and Vicki didn’t have any disposable income to speak of, but she did have something else Jeremy wanted more than money. She didn’t like to think of that now, and not just because it felt uncomfortably close to prostitution. Jeremy hadn’t seen it that way, which at first was nice; unlike Tyler, who constantly reminded her of the transactional nature of their relationship, even when she suspected that wasn’t what he wanted, Jeremy worshipped her, wanted to be seen with her and tell the world about whatever it was they had together. Where Tyler wanted to keep her a secret, Jeremy wanted to lose himself in her, and at first the attention was flattering. But as time wore on she couldn’t help but notice that she seemed to stand in for everything else in his life, that he neither wanted nor needed companionship or satisfaction from any other source but her. That’s when she started to get scared. 

She tried to gently encourage Jeremy to spend time with his friends or his older sister once in a while, but he always looked at her blankly, as if he’d forgotten until that moment that any of them existed. His aunt Jenna moved in with him and his sister Elena, and Vicki knew it was a little hypocritical to push him to spend time at home with his family when she hardly ever did that herself. But there was something about his need for her that had started to frighten her, as if he was an addict who couldn’t see that his chosen drug was slowly consuming him. _What did that make her, then,_ she wondered in her darker moments. She didn’t _want_ to destroy Jeremy, but she also didn’t know how to stop herself sometimes. She didn’t know she’d been his first either, although it wasn’t exactly a mystery once they were in the moment together, alone in her bedroom while Matty was at football and her mom was working the swing shift. His ineptitude had seemed sweet at the time, like everything else about him. It had felt like the start of something gentle and pure, something that would help heal them both. Sure, he refused to talk about his parents and how their death made him feel, but that would come in time, once he learned he was safe with her. After all, he was still processing it.

So she’d spent the rest of the summer waiting for Jeremy to start treating her like a friend, a confidante, a lover, anything besides a drug he was jonesing for. Tyler came back from the beach with his parents, tanned and fit from days of swimming, and his indifference suddenly seemed appealing, like a sign of strength compared to Jeremy’s yawning pit of need for her and the abject hunger in his gaze. She’d told herself she wouldn’t call him until school started -- somehow knowing she’d be back around her friends soon made her more confident she could hold out against him, if she could just make it until then -- but she couldn’t stop him from coming to the Grill with his teammates and looking her up and down as if he’d been starving for the sight of her curves in her short denim skirt. Vicki could never stand up against that look from Tyler. He could say whatever he wanted, could ignore her for weeks at a time, could hang out with Alanna from the cheerleading squad and whisper in her ear as if he thought no one was watching; but that look told the truth about him. It said he wanted her and that he was in her power, not the other way around. 

She supposed if she’d been smarter, she’d have been too proud to date someone who wanted to keep her away from his friends and family, Vicki reflected as the bell rang and she shoved her books into her bag. Instead she found it exciting, as if Tyler’s desire for her was too strong to be denied. What did she care if his snooty family with their cotillions and their fancy cars knew about her? What could any of them possibly say to her that she’d want to hear? Wasn’t he just protecting her from their grasping greed and their conniving plots to keep the two of them apart?

She told herself this on the way to her locker, but she couldn’t stop her heart from sinking when she remembered he’d been at the Grill last night with Alanna, one hand grazing her hip at every opportunity, looking at her just as hungrily as he’d looked at Vicki a week earlier. She could tell herself it wasn’t real, that he was just putting up a front for his family and dating someone socially acceptable when he was in public, but it hadn’t looked like faking. She was just so tired of twisting herself into knots over him, convincing herself he was bad for her, giving into Jeremy’s overtures, which hadn’t stopped even when she’d gone back to Tyler, telling herself Jeremy was different because he was sweet and proud of her, then realizing Jeremy made her feel suffocated and itchy, and breaking it off with him. It was an endless and exhausting cycle, and she dreaded starting it over again but had no idea how to stop herself now that she could feel her shame and frustration and loneliness about Tyler pushing her back inexorably toward Jeremy again.

“Hey,” said a voice behind her shoulder as she switched out the books in her locker. Vicki turned, knowing somehow that this husky, sexy voice belonged to the new girl, Bella. Sure enough, Bella stood there nervously shifting her weight from one foot to the other, smiling with one side of her mouth. 

“Hey,” Vicki answered, since it seemed like Bella was waiting for a response. 

“Do you know where the gym is? I’m supposed to meet with Coach Lyles,” Bella said, raking her fingers through her wavy brown hair. 

“Coach Lyles? I can take you to his office, but I think he’s coaching football right now,” Vicki said, indicating the direction with a nod and then taking off. She decided it was better not to mention how she knew the football practice schedule so well.

“Yeah, that makes sense,” said Bella as she matched Vicki’s long strides toward the double doors leading outside. “I’m trying out for the team.”

Vicki laughed. “Good one. What are you, a buck thirty?”

Bella blushed and Vicki looked away quickly, annoyed by how pretty the flush of pink looked on Bella’s high cheekbones. Christ, you could cut glass with those things. “I was the kicker on my old school’s team. I guess my coach called ahead for me, in case I wanted to play here too. Anyway, I get to try out, which is more than you can say for most schools.”

“No shit? You played football?” Vicki was too amazed to try to play it cool. “That sounds amazing.”

“It was pretty awesome,” Bella agreed, cracking a smile finally. By now they were outside, walking down the sidewalk that wound around the school toward the detached gymnasium where the coaches had their offices. 

“Did you ever get tackled?” Vicki asked, and Bella laughed.

“Not on purpose. Once in a while someone got a hand on me when they were trying to block a field goal. It was no big deal,” she added, and Vicki started to understand where the tough-girl act came from. Maybe she’d earned it after all.

“That’s rad,” said Vicki wonderingly. ‘I never really played sports, unless you count soccer when I was little, back when we’d just run up and down the field and like, try to get a foot on the ball.”

“How do you think I learned to kick?” laughed Bella. 

Vicki smiled and looked down, suddenly feeling bashful. She’d felt so superior to this new girl just a few minutes ago in class, and now she almost felt unworthy to be walking along next to her laughing under the early autumn sunshine like a normal girl. This was who she wanted to be, someone cool and confident and into wholesome challenges like becoming the only girl on the football team, not someone who juggled two boys she didn’t really like and went on nighttime hunting missions with her vampire mentor. At least Stefan had been steering her toward more sustainable hobbies, since she’d be alive to pursue them for a very long time. But the weight of her past suddenly felt monstrously heavy to Vicki.

“There’s the fieldhouse, that brown building next to the field,” she pointed out to Bella, glad for a distraction. “I think all the football coaches have their offices there.” 

“Cool,” said Bella, looking down at the toes of her sneakers shyly. “Do you want -- I mean, no pressure or anything, but if you’re not doing anything right now, you could maybe come watch me try out.”

“I wish I could,” Vicki said, surprising herself by how much she meant it. “I have to go straight to the Grill, that’s where I work--”

“That’s OK,” said Bella in a rush. “Thanks,” she tossed over her shoulder as she started off.

“But maybe you could come by afterward and tell me how it went?” called Vicki, not sure why she was so desperate to keep this conversation going. “The food’s OK, definitely better than what they serve here.”

Bella stopped and turned halfway back around to smile at Vicki. “OK, I’ll try. See you around.”


	2. I Just Want to Stand and Stare

That evening at the Grill felt like the longest one of her life as Vicki refilled sodas and juggled platters of nachos, trying to stop herself from glancing at the door every ten seconds and mostly failing. Tyler wasn’t there, thank god - he’d already let it slip that he had a family dinner that night, and it went without saying that she wasn’t invited to those. Jeremy was there with his scruffy friends, nursing endless refills of Coke and mooning over her whenever she passed their table. Luckily Stefan was there as well, and he made a nice buffer between her and Jeremy. 

Not that Stefan was exactly a barrel of laughs, but he’d loosened up a lot since he and Elena had gotten together for real. Elena was at cheerleading practice, so Stefan was flying solo. This was mostly Vicki’s doing - she’d scolded him for his unwillingness to leave the house whenever Elena was busy with normal teenager stuff like school and cheer practice, and he’d done that annoying faux-conciliatory thing where he spread his hands out and looked long-suffering and asked her what she, Vicki, wanted from him. She’d made him promise to go do activities without Elena at least once a week instead of staying home and brooding. 

So here he was, industriously playing pool by himself and working his way slowly through several pints of the Grill’s fruitest Belgian white ale. Vicki knew better than to ask him about his predilection for beers that came with an orange slice, but she secretly found it hilarious. She gave him a few pointers as she passed, and if he didn’t look like the most exciting person in the room, at least he wasn’t complaining or pouting, which was more than she could say for Jeremy, who had gone from mooning at her to glowering in the course of the evening. No one was serving him booze, obviously, but he had the look of a belligerent drunk all the same, and Vicki wondered what if he’d taken something in the bathroom. She wished for the thousandth time that one of his friends would corral him and take him home, but they all seemed content to sit there tearing the coasters to shreds and blowing bubbles in their sweating glasses of Coke. 

The door swung open and Bella strode in, her hair damp and sweaty and her gym bag slung over one shoulder. Vicki nearly dropped the tray of iced teas she’d been carrying - in her annoyance at Jeremy, she’d forgotten about Bella for three whole minutes. But she recovered herself and got the iced teas delivered while the hostess sat Bella at a two-top, trying to catch her breath. Why was her heart pounding all of a sudden? Bella was sitting in Stacy’s zone, so Vicki ducked into the prep station and asked her to trade tables before she could talk herself out of it. Stacy gave her a puzzled look but agreed - the table Vicki was giving up had just been seated with four people, so the tip would be way bigger. Vicki poured a glass of water and took it to Bella, trying to calm her nerves.

“How’d it go?” She asked, tugging a coaster over and setting the glass down in front of Bella.

“Good,” said Bella shyly. “I made the team.” She tugged the elastic out of one of her short braids and raked her fingers through her hair, loosening the braids into soft waves. Vicki had only known Bella for a few hours and she was already beginning to recognize the hair fiddling as a nervous tell. 

“That’s amazing!” said Vicki, wishing she knew Bella well enough to give her a hug. 

Bella shrugged, blushing as she undid her other braid. “It sounds like I didn’t have a ton of competition. One of the middle linebackers has been doing it, I guess?”

“Oh god, yeah, Justin. He punted a ball out of the endzone last season and cost us the game.”

Bella nodded, fiddling with her straw wrapper. “So you come to the games a lot, then?” she asked, studiously not looking at Vicki. 

“I’ll definitely be there for your first game, how’s that?” Vicki promised before she could stop herself. Bella glanced up in surprise, a half smile on her face. “I have an order up, hold that thought,” she said quickly and dashed away before Bella could respond. 

Vicki delivered a caesar salad and a turkey burger to one of her tables, going through the motions of asking them if they needed anything else and barely registering their answers. The dinner rush was nearly over so she had a breather to go check on Stefan, who was still brooding over his game of pool.

“Who’s the girl? I haven’t seen her around school,” he asked, lining up a shot awkwardly and knocking the back end of his pool cue against the wall. 

Vicki sighed and adjusted his grip, which he accepted without complaining. He’d learned to be grateful for her feedback when she’d saved him from getting hustled by the town pool shark a few months back. “Why do you even still go to school, Stefan? You don’t even look like a teenager.”

“I was eighteen when I turned!” he grumbled, sinking the eleven ball.

“That must have been some hard living,” Vicki snarked. 

“Yeah, it was the Civil War. I had a few other things on my mind besides moisturizing.”

“Stefan, there’s no point in living forever--”

“Shhhh!”

Vicki rolled her eyes. “No one is listening! You’re not that interesting! And as I was saying,” she continued, lowering her voice, “there’s no point in living forever if you can’t enjoy things and let other people enjoy things. I bet you don’t guilt trip Elena for moisturizing.”

Stefan chuckled, which was the closest he would ever come to admitting she’d scored a point. “You never answered my question. Who’s the girl?”  
“Bella Swan, transfer student. Comes from Oregon, I think.” 

“You don’t know where she’s from?”

“Should I?”

Stefan shrugged. “You guys seem like you know each other pretty well already. You asked her how something went and got all excited when she said it went well.”

“Seriously, do you have to eavesdrop on every conversation I have?”

“When it’s interesting, I do.” He glanced at her and smiled for real before trying to sink the last ball and scratching instead. Vicki almost admired his willingness to keep being terrible at pool. He straightened up and rubbed chalk on his cue as if he’d just cleared the table in one go. “This seems good for you. I’m happy you made a new friend.”

“Ugh, don’t make it weird. I was just asking her about her football tryouts.”

Stefan put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I won’t make it weird. But I’m happy for you.”

Vicki laughed and shook her head as she went to grab the water pitcher. She tried to bypass Jeremy as she refilled people’s glasses, but he tugged her sleeve as she passed. 

“Vic, I need to talk to you,” he said beseechingly, and Vicki felt the now-familiar combination of annoyance and sympathy that she’d come to associate with Jeremy. She couldn’t remember why she’d ever been attracted to him, but she was afraid of what would happen to him if she cut him off completely, and she wasn’t sure she could live with the outcome, even - especially? - if it was benign.

“Make it quick,” she sighed.

“No, not here -- come hang out with me after you get done?”

“I can’t, Jer, I have to study.”

“You used to study with me,” he pouted. 

“I have to study for real, Jer. I have a chemistry test on Thursday and I’m barely making a B as it is.”

“You never used to care so much about school,” he said suspiciously, eyeing Vicki as if she might be concealing a gun beneath her apron.  
“Yeah, well, the prospect of flunking out has a way of making you care,” Vicki said defiantly. It was only half true -- she’d definitely been on her way to flunking when Damon had turned her into a vampire, and she would have been happy to quit school completely, but Stefan had insisted she finish. “Future Vicki will thank you,” he’d explained cryptically, and Present-Day Vicki knew it was easier to go along with Stefan’s rules than to argue with him.

Jeremy sighed and rearranged his feet on the bench across from him, which was empty now that all his stoner friends were gone. “Fine. I just thought you should know that that guy you’ve been talking to is dating my sister.”

“What guy? You mean Stefan?” Jeremy nodded as if Vicki was touched in the head. “Is there some reason I should care who he’s dating?”

Jeremy rolled his eyes. “Oh, gee, let’s see, why would Vicki Donovan possibly want to know if a guy is single or not?” Vicki had never wanted to punch Jeremy as much as she did right now. Stefan had compelled Jeremy to forget about her becoming a vampire for everyone’s safety, mostly his own. Vicki didn’t want Jeremy up in her business anymore, but it did get frustrating on occasion to not be able to tell him the truth. 

“Fuck you, Jeremy. You don’t know anything about me,” she said and flounced off, wishing that were true for some other reason than vampire compulsion.

She passed Stefan on her way back to the kitchen, and he nodded toward Bella’s table. “Your friend’s leaving,” he said mildly. Vicki turned, and sure enough, Bella was gathering up her bags. Vicki rushed over.

“Hey!” she said, louder than she’d meant to, and Bella turned as she stood up and slung her gym bag over one shoulder, looking slightly alarmed.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell,” murmured Vicki, feeling suddenly sweaty and flushed.

Bella smiled shyly. “I wasn’t trying to sneak out. Just looks like you have a lot on your plate. Uh, no pun intended,” she added, chuckling at her own bad joke. 

“Trust me, I’m not trying to spend any more time talking to Jeremy than I have to,” said Vicki, rolling her eyes toward Jeremy’s table and hoping that got the point across. She wasn’t quite ready to go into the gory details about her history with Jeremy yet, as much as she liked Bella and wanted to hang out with her again. 

“Kind of an ex situation?” asked Bella.

“Kind of,” agreed Vicki. 

Bella made a sympathetic face. “Sucks that he can come camp out here while you’re at work.”

Vicki shrugged, although she was privately elated that Bella agreed with her. “The devil you know, huh?

“What about that guy?” Bella asked, nodding toward Stefan, who appeared to be concentrating on lining up a shot. Vicki could tell by his face that he was eavesdropping, but for once he had enough good manners to play along. 

“He’s more like a big brother,” Vicki said. 

“He’s kind of cute,” said Bella, tilting her head as if she were assessing Stefan’s merits as a dude. 

“Is he?” Vicki asked honestly. She was surprised to realize she felt disappointed. Why had she assumed Bella was into girls? And even if she were, that was no guarantee she’d be into Vicki specifically. And when had her interest in this girl she’d only met today turned into such an intense crush? Either way, Stefan didn’t do it for her, so it was sometimes hard to imagine someone being attracted to him.

Bella laughed. “I mean, for a guy.” Vicki’s heart leaped again. She was going to need CPR if she kept hanging out with this girl. 

“I can introduce you if you want, but he has a girlfriend and he’s pretty whipped. It’s kind of embarrassing, honestly.”

Bella laughed again. “He just reminds me of a guy I knew at my old school. You guys are friends?”

“Yeah, I guess we are,” Vicki said, smiling wryly. If you’d told her a year ago that she’d be calling Stefan Salvatore a friend, she’d have called you crazy. “He helped me through some really hard shit. I don’t know what I would have done without him. He’s kind of a dork, obviously,” she said, and Bella laughed. “But yeah, he was really there for me when I needed a friend.”

“Introduce us, then, if you want,” smiled Bella. “Anyone who can stick by a friend like that is cool in my book.” 

Vicki led Bella over to where Stefan was glowering at the cue ball and finishing off his pint of fruity beer, feeling absurdly pleased that Bella wanted to meet her dorky vampire mentor. Not that she could explain exactly what the difficult circumstances were that Stefan had helped her through, but hopefully she wouldn’t need to go into specifics. She introduced them and they shook hands gravely.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Stefan,” said Bella with a twinkle. 

“That’s worrying,” said Stefan, frowning at Vicki, and Bella burst out laughing. 

“We just met today,” said Bella, nodding at Vicki. “How much dirt do you really think we’ve gotten into?”

“I shudder to think,” said Stefan, but he managed to crack a smile, which Vicki knew must have taken a huge effort on his part. 

“Want to play a round?” asked Bella.

“Only if you go easy on me. Vic’s been teaching me but I’m not picking it up very quickly,” said Stefan, throwing a baleful glance at the half-cleared pool table. 

The rest of Vicki’s shift flew by, especially once Jeremy threw in the towel and went home. Bella and Stefan seemed to get along well -- she even made Stefan laugh a couple of times, which was no small accomplishment. Vicki felt a pang of jealousy each time she heard their voices raised in laughter, wishing she could be goofing off along with them instead of serving fajitas and chef salads to a bunch of annoying families and endless coke refills to her classmates.  
After all, it wasn’t as if Stefan had to work, she thought glumly. He did go to school every day like a goody-two-shoes, for some reason she couldn’t fathom; why anyone would willingly endure high school more than once was beyond Vicki. But after school he got to dick around at the Grill while she slaved away, even though they both ostensibly had the same power to compel other people. 

That was how vampires typically kept a roof over their heads, Stefan had explained (although calling the Salvatore mansion a “roof” was a hilarious understatement). Vicki kind of understood his insistence that she stay in school, as annoying as it was. Vampire or not, she still wanted to have as many options as possible when figuring out what to do with her life, since it was now going to go on forever, barring getting staked or some other disaster. But his mandate that she also continue working at the Grill was just dumb. The whole reason she’d taken this stupid job was to make sure there was a little extra cash at hand to keep the lights on and pizza on the table whenever her mom went AWOL. It didn’t happen often, but she knew now to be prepared for when it did. Matty could only work during the summer because of football; he’d get kicked off the team if his GPA slipped below a 3, so between studying and football, there was no way he could fit in a job, so Vicki had fallen on that sword and been happy to do it. 

But now there was no need for it, as far as she could see. She could compel herself and Matty some money, of course, but she could also compel their mom to stay in town and keep the job she’d somehow landed as a telemarketer. She didn’t make much there, but it was enough to keep the three of them fed and housed as long as she stayed off the horse, which Vicki could take care of as easily as snapping someone’s neck. After all, she’d tried to reason with Stefan, what was the point of being able to compel people if you couldn’t use it for something good, like making her mom stay clean? But Stefan had just shaken his head and looked grim, and the next time she saw him, he had a charm bracelet with a little locket full of vervain, and he’d told her to give it to her mother, and Vicki had. She hadn’t even needed to be told Stefan would periodically show up at her mom’s work pretending to be a supervisor, just to check she was wearing the bracelet. Of course he would check up on her and treat her like a little kid. He didn’t know what it was like to have your safety and well-being hanging by the tiniest, most fragile thread imaginable. All he cared about was blending in with the Mystic Falls townsfolk so he could date Elena and pass for a high school kid. 

Not that she really held a grudge for that, she reflected as she wiped tables down after her shift was over. Stefan and Bella had both slipped out toward the end of the dinner rush with a small wave each. He could be infuriatingly hell-bent on following his own cockamamie set of rules about how to vampire, but he was also her only real friend at the moment. It sounded lonely but she supposed it was a step up from zero, which was how many she’d had before becoming a vampire. She wished he hadn’t let Bella leave - not that she expected him to compel her, but they’d seemed to be having fun - but she also felt a delicious shiver of anticipation when she thought of seeing Bella tomorrow. What did that even mean? 

She turned the idea over and over in her head as she drove home, the sun just setting in the balmy peach-colored autumn sky. She rolled her window down and punched buttons on the car stereo until she found something appropriate: “Ziggy Stardust” by David Bowie. She resisted the urge to crank the volume up, knowing some elderly busybody would recognize her car and snitch to Stefan or Matty, but she sang along softly and pulled her hair out of its ponytail, letting the breeze catch the tendrils and lift them up around her head like a halo.

Vicki was still humming when she got out of her car and jogged up the steps, but she pulled up short when she saw a shadowy figure sitting on the porch swing in the dark. Involuntarily her hand went to her throat. 

“Hey Vic, it’s been a minute.”

“Jesus Christ, Tyler! You scared the shit out of me! I thought you were a burglar!” 

“I’d have to be a pretty shitty one if I can’t even get inside,” he smirked, pleased with his own wit, as he got up from the swing and lurched toward her. Even from five feet away Vicki could smell the alcohol on his breath, the sweet pungency of Captain Morgan. She knew his booze of choice, knew he snuck it from his parents’ liquor cabinet, which they depleted so regularly themselves that they either didn’t notice someone else was helping them, or they didn’t care. She stepped away from him instinctively; knowing she could now break his arm like a twig didn’t make him any less menacing. 

“Aren’t you happy to see me?” he asked in what she now recognized as his cajoling voice. He thought it would work on her, probably because it always had in the past. 

“Sure, Ty,” she said warily. “I’m just tired. Long day at the Grill. I’ll see you tomorrow, OK?” She asked, knowing tomorrow was a school day and there was no way in hell he’d talk to her at school, but he might be drunk enough now to agree.

He shook his head and made a whiny sigh out of his nose. “I want to see you now. It’s been forever. You’re not avoiding me, are you?”

Vicki was starting to get annoyed. She’d had enough to deal with today without Tyler bitching about her failure to chase after him for three whole days. “Come on Ty, just go home. You’re drunk anyway and this isn’t fun for me.”

“Oh all of a sudden this isn’t fun anymore?” Tyler sneered. She hated him when he was like this. “You know how much trouble I could get in with my parents for even speaking to you?”

“You’d better go then,” said Vicki, taking his arm and steering him gently back toward his pickup truck. Tyler jerked his arm out of her grasp. Vicki pulled away and turned toward him, expecting him to be staring at her angrily, but there was a whoosh that ruffled her hair slightly, and then Tyler simply - wasn’t there. 

She knew better than to be surprised by now. “Stefan?” she called, not too loud so as not to wake the neighbors. At first there was nothing, just crickets chirping gently and a soft breeze ruffling the leaves of the willow tree in her front yard. Then an arm appeared out of the tree branches and waved awkwardly. 

“Stefan!” She hissed as she approached, skipping over the grass in her work sneakers. “You can let him go now!”

A few seconds passed, and then Tyler landed gracelessly in a heap on the grass below the willow tree. He got up unsteadily but on his own steam, so he couldn’t be too badly hurt. Vicki marched up to him and pulled his face down toward hers.

“You got drunk and tried to climb the tree in your front yard. You didn’t see me tonight. You’re going home and going straight to bed. Wait,” she added, releasing his head and then grabbing it again. Tyler continued to stare numbly into her eyes, his own brown ones glassy and unfocused. “You’re going home, drinking a glass of water, and then going straight to bed.” With that she released his head, maybe a little harder than was strictly necessary, and looked up into the tree.

“Coming down?” She asked. On cue Stefan landed noiselessly beside her.

“Did you forget what we talked about? We agreed you wouldn’t compel anyone until I think you’re ready.” He took her shoulder and guided her back toward her front door.

“No, you ordered me not to compel anyone and I mostly obeyed you. Besides, we also agreed that I don’t need you to protect me anymore. I can take care of myself.”

“It’s not a question of whether you can defend yourself. You’re more than capable of that,” Stefan said, and Vicki felt her shoulders puff up a little with pride. It was the first time Stefan had acknowledged she could do anything vampire-y on her own. “I just want to make sure you don’t accidentally kill him. You’re still learning how to control your bloodlust.”

“What if I… not-so-accidentally killed him?” Vicki asked, and Stefan finally cracked a smile. 

“I wouldn’t really blame you,” he said. “That guy has put you through a lot.”

“Thanks, Stefan. For real. That means a lot to have someone acknowledge it.” Vicki couldn’t believe she was standing on her front porch talking about her feelings with notorious stick-up-the-ass Stefan Salvatore. 

He shrugged awkwardly in that way that always made Vicki wonder if he thought she was catching feelings for him. She had never quite come up with a nice way to say, “I’m not attracted to you and I’m not trying to steal you away from Elena, it’s just nice to have a friend,” so she always kept her mouth shut and let Stefan think whatever he wanted. “Your friend seems really nice, by the way,” he said, surprising Vicki with the seeming non-sequitur. “Maybe you guys can hang out again soon.”

“You’re sure you’re cool with me being close friends with a human? What if I like, catch her scent and go crazy with bloodlust?” she teased him. 

“You won’t,” said Stefan, chuckling out of his nose, which was about the biggest laugh she’d ever gotten out of him. Vicki suspected that for all his put-upon attitude, he secretly liked getting to play the older sibling for a change. “You’ve come a long way in the last year. If you and Bella end up hanging out or… or anything like that, you’ll control yourself for her sake. I could see it in the way you were with her.”

Vicki stared into the darkened street, belatedly reminding herself to close her mouth, which had fallen open in astonishment. How was this brand-new thing between her and the new girl so obvious that Stefan Salvatore, the most emotionally constipated man she’d ever met, was picking up on it before she herself even knew what was going on? She watched the moths flutter around the orange streetlight, the same way she used to do when she and Tyler had made out on this porch a year ago, even though it felt like a hundred. Was this what it meant to be a vampire? Constantly stumbling onto places or images or smells or songs that had meant something vastly different to her in a former life? She remembered everything about Tyler vividly: the way his hair smelled when he was kissing her neck, the way he drummed the steering wheel with one hand while he drove, the fastidious, carnivorous way he ate everything from a bagel to a chicken fried steak. But all of it was like it had happened to someone else, like she’d seen it in a movie. 

She suddenly felt so weary, even when thinking of seeing Bella the next day. How could she go through all this again for the sake of a feeling she might not be able to conjure up a year from now, even if she wanted to? How could she fall for anyone ever again, knowing she had all eternity to wear those feelings thin and frayed, for them to lose all their color and shape and taste?

“Where’d you go, Vic?” asked Stefan softly. 

“Sorry,” she gasped. “I just got kind of overwhelmed there for a minute.” 

Stefan followed her gaze to the moths thudding against the streetlight. “It can be a lot of responsibility, dating after you become a vampire. Depends on whether you treat humans like humans, or like…”

“Like juiceboxes,” finished Vicki, laughing to cover the lump in her throat.

“Exactly. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Bella’s no shrinking violet. You might be surprised what she can handle.” 

“I haven’t even dated a girl before,” Vicki admitted. “And how do you know so much about her anyway? You guys just met today.” 

Stefan smiled in that way she knew he thought of as mysterious. It always made her laugh. “I have my ways,” he said, and Vicki snorted at him. 

“I need to go in. I don’t want to wake my mom.”

“You eaten today? I was going to go hunting.”

Vicki shook her head. “I’m going to crash out. Tomorrow?”

“Don’t leave it too long,” Stefan said, saluting her as he left. What a dork, Vicki thought as she opened the door as quietly as possible and tiptoed to her room.


	3. You Leave Me Tangled in a Knot

The next day Vicki didn’t see Bella all day. They didn’t have any classes together - algebra was on A days, and this was a B day - and she scanned the lunchroom for any sign of Bella’s cropped haircut and came up goose eggs. As she switched her books out of her locker before heading home, Vicki wondered why she’d been so sure they’d run into each other. It wasn’t that crazy of an idea - Mystic Falls High was only about 700 students total - but she could also go days without seeing certain people. Tyler, for instance, had made a career out of avoiding her at school but being very available after hours. But this thing, whatever it was, with Bella had felt different. Like for once, something in Vicki’s life might be easy, might just fall into place without Vicki twisting herself into knots over it and rewriting the code of her own soul just to make herself into the right person for someone else. Somehow she had this feeling she already was the right person for Bella, no twisting or rewriting needed. 

It was dumb to pin everything on one day, she supposed as she walked out to the parking lot. Awfully overdramatic of her. You’d think this was her first crush or something. Just because her paths hadn’t crossed with Bella’s today didn’t mean anything. For all she knew, Bella had been hoping to see her too. And they’d see each other in algebra on Monday, but that was three whole days away and Vicki would just as soon not have to wait that long. 

Vicki paused to let a white sedan cross in front of her, and it did, but then it stopped abruptly twenty feet beyond her. Vicki raised an eyebrow but kept going toward her own beat up hand-me-down Nissan in the next row, but the sedan’s window rolled down and a hand waved frantically out of the driver’s side. 

“Hey!” shouted a voice. Vicki crept toward the car cautiously, heart pounding in her ears. It can’t be, she thought. How weird would it be if Bella appeared right when Vicki was thinking about her? Although by that logic she should have appeared in every one of Vicki’s classes that day, not to mention at the breakfast table next to her.

Vicki peered in the open window, and sure enough, there was Bella, blue eyes gazing up at her and a sheepish grin on her face. 

“Happy Friday,” said Bella. “You doing anything tonight?”

Vicki shook her head. “I was maybe going to get some food.” Her stomach rumbled. Stefan had been right, she should have gone hunting yesterday instead of finishing her homework and then spending the rest of the night making a mix CD she definitely wasn’t going to give to Bella, but that might make for good listening when she was holed up in her room obsessing about Bella. Now she was obsessing about her in a different way, leaning irresistibly closer and trying not to inhale her scent too deeply.

Bella didn’t seem to notice how creepy Vicki was being, or maybe it didn’t bother her. “Want to come over? We can order pizza. My dad has a Playstation, if that’s, you know, something you’re into.”

“I am,” Vicki said, trying not to sound too forceful. She had moved her feet consciously away from Bella’s car, but the rest of her body wasn’t cooperating, so now her torso was awkwardly craned down toward the open driver’s side window as if she was peering over a fence. She needed Bella to get out of here now. “I just need to run home first. I have to change clothes.”

“Why?” asked Bella. There was an impish twinkle in her eye that Vicki would normally have found impossibly alluring, and that was troubling enough on its own, but Vicki’s brain wasn’t working at the moment and she suspected it had something to do with Bella’s scent and the way her hair fell softly over one cheekbone and the pout of her lower lip as she grinned mischievously. 

“I’m having my period,” Vicki blurted, loud enough for a guy walking by to turn and stare at her as if she’d sprouted a third arm. 

Bella’s smirk instantly turned to sympathy. “Oh god, I’m sorry. If you need to just chill at home--”

“No, I’m good, I just need to, you know, change my underwear,” Vicki laughed awkwardly, gesturing vaguely toward her privates. 

“OK, want to meet me at my place then? 745 Crescent, behind the 7-11.” 

“Got it,” Vicki said, waving like an idiot until Bella drove away. Once Bella was gone she could finally stagger to her car, feeling weirdly guilty for accepting Bella’s sympathy - of course vampires didn’t get periods anymore, another perk she’d discovered on her own. Stefan had had a good laugh explaining that to her after she’d come to him distraught, worried that she was going to give birth to the half-vampire baby of either Tyler or Jeremy and unable to decide which was worse.  
What she needed now was blood, and since it was the middle of the afternoon, that meant she’d have to settle for squirrel. She avoided dogs and cats since there was no telling which ones were strays and which had humans looking after them, and pet owners were bound to get suspicious (and angry) if their animals started mysteriously going missing one after the other. That left wild animals, and unfortunately the best ones tended to be nocturnal. Vicki had tried rabbits, squirrels, raccoons (surprisingly tasty given all the garbage they ate), possums, even the occasional coyote or deer. Coyote was her absolute favorite, maybe because they were so hard to catch and they felt dangerous, even though there was nothing they could do to her that wouldn’t heal in a few seconds. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt, and the pain combined with the satisfaction of drinking its blood always left Vicki deeply pleased. 

But it was four in the afternoon now, which meant she’d be lucky to find a rabbit. She drove to the park, blinking rapidly in the slanting sunlight as her vision swam slightly. Jesus, she’d really pushed it this time. She was lucky she hadn’t ripped Bella’s head off. After parking her car, Vicki trotted down the paved walkway as slowly as she could manage, toward a cluster of trees that would provide a little cover and hopefully her dinner as well. She did her best to look like an athlete out for an afternoon jog, rather than a hunter on the prowl. There were a few moms with strollers and old people about, and no one seemed to be paying attention to her but Stefan had taught her to be a little paranoid, so she did her best to act casual until she was safely hidden by the stand of trees at the far end of the park.  
Mercifully, she found food quickly; squirrels were fast but not very smart, and she had killed and drained two in a matter of minutes. Vicki finally felt the aching void in her stomach ease off, not completely gone but blunted, manageable now. Even this minor level of satisfaction made her sleepy and relaxed, but she needed to go home and change clothes and then hustle over to Bella’s in a way that would hopefully not come across as overeager. The changing clothes part had at least not been a lie; she’d gotten pretty good at minimizing the mess when she hunted, but it was hard to avoid a couple of splashes of blood, so she’d also gotten good at running her clothes under cold water in the bathroom sink before putting them in the laundry, not that anyone was likely to see them but her. Even when her mom was home, Vicki did her own laundry; it was another task that felt comforting to take control of, just in case her mom disappeared again.

Vicki dithered in front of her bureau for an embarrassingly long time, picking up one t-shirt and putting it down again in favor of another. Anything dressier than that was out of the question, since this obviously wasn’t a date. Why did she care? How much difference could it make whether she wore a black t-shirt or a blue striped one? In the end she went with the blue stripes only because black reminded her of emo kids which in turn reminded her of Jeremy, who was the last person she wanted to be thinking about right now.

The flutter in her stomach as she pulled up in front of Bella’s house and jogged up the front walk surprised her. What did she think was going to happen, anyway? Before her brain could supply her with an inappropriate answer to that question, Bella opened the door, looking slightly out of breath. 

“Hey! You’re here!” she said, sounding both happy and a little surprised. Her feet were bare and she had changed into cutoffs, and Vicki felt herself blushing as she tore her eyes away from Bella’s toned calves, not without an effort.

“Yeah, I’m here. I hope it’s cool with your dad,” Vicki heard herself saying. Another new lameness to add to her Upstanding Vampire Citizen list. Since when did she care what anyone’s parents thought about anything? Bella’s dad was probably even more clueless than the other adults in Mystic Falls, who at least knew about vampires, even if they couldn’t spot one to save their lives.

“He’s still at work, but yeah, it’s totally fine if I have people over. Not that I’ve actually done it yet. You’re the first,” Bella said in a rush, finishing with a little jazz-hands motion as she led Vicki to the kitchen.

“I tried to make nachos but they came out kind of… runny?” Bella was saying, and Vicki realized the smell she’d been trying to place was that of hot cheese. “I don’t know, I think I used the wrong kind of cheese.” Bella gestured at a plate on the narrow counter, which held a scattering of tortilla chips covered with something glutinous and orange. It looked like a mess but smelled divine.

“I bet you used cheddar, right?” asked Vicki. Bella shrugged and handed her a half-grated brick of cheese from the counter. The peeled-back wrapper said EXTRA-SHARP CHEDDAR. “It’ll still be good, it just melts all weird. Do you have any jalapenos? Or olives?”

“Good call,” said Bella, throwing the fridge open. She came back with a jar of pickled jalapenos and a plastic tub with a few scrapings of sour cream left. 

“Perfect,” said Vicki. “Here, let me.” She grabbed a spoon and set about arranging the jalapenos and sour cream to make the nachos look a little more restaurant-worthy, not that you could do a whole lot with only four ingredients. 

Bella laughed in delight. “It looks like it came from the Grill!” Vicki grinned bashfully, surprised how much this compliment pleased her. “Want to take it into the living room?” Bella asked, nodding toward the doorway. Vicki smiled and followed her.

They made quick work of the nachos, and then Bella gave Vicki an exhaustive tutorial on the finer points of Grand Theft Auto. Vicki shrieked in delight as she ran her car off the road and plowed down a sidewalk crammed with pedestrians.

“You’ve really never played this before?” laughed Bella, putting aside the controller when they stopped for a breather. 

Vicki shook her head. “My brother Matt is kind of serious. You probably met him actually, he’s on the football team. Tall, blond, kind of virtuous-looking.”

Bella laughed. “The weird thing is that I know exactly who you’re talking about. Lots of tall blond guys on the football team, but as soon as you said ‘virtuous,’ I was like ‘yep, that’s number 18.”

“That’s him!” Vicki shrieked, and Bella high-fived her. She tried not to let her own hand linger on Bella’s but the other girl’s touch seared her skin, and she felt her cheeks grow hot. 

“Anyway, Matt’s too nice to steal a car, even in a video game. Plus he doesn’t really have the time, between football and school and his job.”

“You guys both work?” asked Bella gently. 

“I know, it’s kind of intense,” Vicki heard herself saying. Was she actually about to tell a total stranger about their family’s money problems? “He only works weekends. At the Grill, same as me. It’s the best job in town if you haven’t gone to college yet.”

Bella took a sip of her Coke meditatively. “Sounds like you guys both work really hard,” she began gently.

“Well, Matty does,” Vicki began automatically, then stopped herself. “I guess I do too. I never really thought of myself that way.”

“Yeah, going to school during the day and working at night? I think that qualifies as hard-working. Shit, I pat myself on the back just for finishing my homework, and I don’t even have a job. I bet you make good grades, too, huh?”

“They’re getting better,” Vicki said, taking a swig of root beer to hide the blush she could feel creeping up her cheeks. Since when did talking about grades qualify as flirting? But she couldn’t deny how pleased it made her that Bella thought of her as smart or scholarly or even that most boring of compliments, hard-working. When Bella said it, it sounded like a real compliment, like something that had made her notice Vicki, in a good way.

“I used to be more of a slacker,” Vicki added, more to fill the awkward silence than because she really wanted to revisit her own bad behavior.

“Yeah? What changed?” asked Bella, smiling gamely. 

Vicki paused, fiddling with the game controller just for something to do with her hands. How did you even start a conversation like this? Bella was so nice and normal; she was probably expecting an answer like I quit drinking or I had a really great teacher who talked some sense into me. The latter wasn’t that far off from the truth, actually. She smiled to think of dorky Stefan that way, as some sort of Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds type of character. 

But she couldn’t explain her scholastic transformation without explaining the literal transformation she went through first. And for the first time, Vicki realized she wanted to keep her vampirism a secret, not for her own protection or peace of mind, but because she didn’t want to burden someone else with that knowledge. Becoming a vampire had been a good thing for Vicki, once Stefan had come along and given her the crash course in living among humans and keeping a low profile. But she knew many vampires felt intense regret and shame over their new altered state, including Stefan himself. And even without feeding on Bella or turning her into a vampire - Vicki’s cheeks burned again just at the thought - Vicki knew she couldn’t share this with Bella without profoundly changing her views of life and death and humanity. And she wasn’t ready to burden Bella with that knowledge, not when they’d just barely met and become friends. The human Vicki was pretending to be right now might look a lot different than the actual human she’d been just a few months ago. But being around Bella made her feel a little more at home in that human disguise, and she wasn’t ready to give that up yet.

“It wasn’t just one thing,” Vicki finally said, wishing there was an answer she could give that wasn’t an outright lie. “I just got tired of how much work it was, lying to Matty and showing up at school hung over and saving my paychecks for shitty painkillers. It was just unsustainable,” she finished, realizing that part at least was true. 

Bella’s expression was unreadable, and Vicki wondered if she’d said too much. Why couldn’t she stop talking about herself? How did the sanitized version of her story end up twisting itself around into the true version? 

“Sounds to me like you’re killing it,” said Bella softly, and Vicki couldn’t believe the way her heart leaped at this.

That night Vicki lay in bed replaying the afternoon with Bella in her head, and she couldn’t stop smiling. Her face was starting to hurt. They’d played some more Grand Theft Auto, and then Bella had declared herself hungry enough to eat Vicki’s leg, so they’d ordered pizza, Vicki giggling to herself while Bella was on the phone with Domino’s. Bella’s dad had wandered in while they ate in front of the TV, watching reruns of Star Trek Voyager. Vicki had felt her shoulders tense when he came in and slid a piece of pizza onto a plate - she barely knew anything about her own dad, and sometimes her friends’ dads looked at her for too long, sizing her up creepily or making suggestive jokes that made her friends roll their eyes - but he barely looked at her, just waved a hand in greeting and took his pizza to the bedroom. Bella hadn’t told her much about him and Vicki hadn’t asked. They seemed relaxed and cordial, at least, if not particularly close.

They’d stayed up talking late, and then Bella had walked Vicki to her car at nearly 2 a.m. She wasn’t sure why she declined Bella’s offer to stay over - actually, she was sure, but she wasn’t ready to admit it to herself. It wasn’t as if she’d be sleeping anyway, just staring at the ceiling listening to Bella breathe and trying not to inhale her scent too deeply. Vicki was a lot stronger now than when she’d first become a vampire, but she knew she still couldn’t handle seven hours of that.

She’d wanted to tell Bella about vampires when they stood on the sidewalk next to Vicki’s car. She wondered if they were going to keep doing this forever, standing awkwardly in front of one of their cars, trying to say goodbye but not wanting the night to be over, and she was surprised how happy that idea made her. She would take awkward hangout time with Bella over none at all. Maybe it was weird of her to turn down an invitation to stay the night with the girl she liked (and she was realizing now she must like Bella, that was the only possible explanation for how she was feeling, as crazy as it sounded). But as long as Bella still liked her too on some level, even just as friends, that was OK.

“I think we should tell her,” Stefan said the next day.

They were ostensibly hunting, but they’d already found a possum - well, technically Stefan had found the possum - and split it, and now they were just lounging by the reservoir, pretending to watch out for wildlife that would most likely avoid them now that the sun was high in the sky. Vicki lay back on the concrete embankment and closed her eyes, wishing for the thousandth time she could still get a tan. Being pale was better than burning alive - thanks, daylight ring - but she missed laying out in the backyard with a trashy novel and coming indoors in the evening looking sunkissed. She’d get blond streaks around her face from the peroxide in her Clearasil, and she’d pretend they were naturally occurring (which in a way, she supposed now, they were). That part she could still do - her hair wasn’t any more alive than the rest of her - but she no longer needed the Clearasil and she didn’t have the heart to go buy bleach. It ruined the magic if it happened on purpose.

“Why would I tell Bella I’m a vampire? I thought you were into keeping a low profile, blending in with the townsfolk, that sort of thing.”

“That’s true, but I told Elena.”

“I think it’s more like Elena found out,” Vicki corrected him, and Stefan inclined his head toward her in that way he did when she’d scored a point.

“Either way,” Stefan conceded, “I think it would be good for you to have someone you can be yourself around. Honesty is important in relationships.”

“We’re not in a relationship. At least, not yet,” Vicki added when Stefan raised an eyebrow at her.

“But you’d like to be,” Stefan said. Vicki could tell by his tone that it wasn’t a question, and she huffed her hair away from her forehead in annoyance.

“You always act like you know what everyone else is thinking,” she groused, but she could hear Stefan smiling even without opening her eyes.

“Give me a little credit for learning a few things about human nature over the last hundred and fifty years,” he said good-naturedly.

Vicki propped up on her elbows as a thought struck her. “Doesn’t it bother you that I want to date a girl? You’re from like, Civil War times. I would have thought you’d be more old-fashioned about this.”

“There were gay people in Civil War times,” said Stefan, one side of his mouth twitching upward in amusement.

“OK, but didn’t they have to be all secretive about it? Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Sometimes they did,” Stefan acknowledged. “You couldn’t get married to someone of the same sex - at least, not in a church. And of course a lot of people thought it was unnatural or a mortal sin or whatever other words they were using at the time to control other people’s behavior.” He was silent for a long moment, and Vicki opened one eye against the sun to check on him - of course he was staring out at the water with his inscrutable “thinking face.”

“I’m not trying to downplay the dangers gay people faced, or the terrible things people are capable of when they encounter something they don’t understand. People can be monsters when they’re afraid. You know that as well as I do.” He stared at the water again, and Vicki suddenly felt like crying, partly from sadness and partly from gratitude at having her past struggles recognized. For so long she’d felt invisible, as if something could happen to erase her right off the face of the earth, and no one would notice her absence or remember that she’d ever lived in the first place. She didn’t have to worry about that now - whatever happened to her in the future, she was going to be a lot harder to annihilate than before, and she had a lot more time to make her mark on the world, whatever that ended up looking like. But she was still occasionally filled with an overwhelming sadness for the fragile girl she’d been, for how bleak and unforgiving her short life had been and how desperately and wildly she’d tried to cling to it. Even back then she’d known partying and drinking and staying out all night were probably going to shorten her life, not prolong it - she wasn’t stupid. But those had been the only times she felt visible, as if the stage lights were finally being trained right on her. Hearing Stefan acknowledge her pain as trauma instead of self-inflicted stupidity brought the sting of tears to her eyes for a moment.

“But people did find ways to make it work, sometimes,” Stefan finally continued. “Everything was a lot more spread out back then, and we didn’t have the internet,” he added, turning to wink at Vicki. She rolled her eyes in mock annoyance. Stefan thought it was hilarious that Vicki couldn’t remember a time before the internet existed, and he liked to tease her about it even though they’d only gotten a computer at their house two years ago, when Matty’s football coach had insisted he needed one for school, and magically one had appeared on the kitchen table the next day. 

“Just because you don’t read about them in your history books doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Stefan went on, warming to his subject. The inadequacies of the public school system were one of his favorite topics, so Vicki settled in to listen. “A farmer in the next town over from us lived with another man. People said they were cousins but I don’t think anyone actually believed that. It was just the easiest way to explain a relationship we didn’t have a word for yet.”

“No one bothered them?” asked Vicki, keeping her eyes closed. Technically she didn’t need sleep anymore, but she still liked taking catnaps, and Stefan’s lectures were often soporific, in a good way. _Take that, Mr. Ames_ , she thought triumphantly. _I just used “soporific” in a sentence and it wasn’t even for school credit._

Stefan was shaking his head. “Things were different then. You had to depend on everyone you knew just for survival. For example, you might think it was funny that the town doctor couldn’t look anyone in the eye when he talked to them, but if you wanted his help delivering your baby, you’d be wise to treat him like a person.”

“Did that really happen?” Vicki kept her eyes closed but she could hear Stefan nodding. 

“No one had time to get exercised about what other people did. It doesn’t mean we were better or nicer back then - far from it.” Stefan paused for a long time. Vicki still didn’t know how he and his brother Damon had become vampires, and in these moments when he seemed to drift off, she wondered if that’s what he was thinking about. “But there’s only so many hours in a day,” he continued, his voice pitched slightly lower than before, a little rougher as it came out of his throat. “Just surviving and getting through the day took up most of them. If you had any energy left at the end of the day, you counted yourself lucky if you had someone to talk to, especially if it wasn’t about farming or childrearing.”

“Do you miss it?” Vicki asked before she could stop herself.

Stefan shook his head. “God no,” he said abruptly, and Vicki laughed. She’d been bracing for a discursive, nuanced answer.

“I don’t know, it sounds really simple,” she pointed out. “Don’t you get tired of like, cell phones and social media? The 24-hour news cycle?”

Stefan laughed. “Sure, but I don’t want to go back to before we had all that stuff. And definitely not the 1800s or before. It was simple, but not in a good way. Your life expectancy was only about 40, and you spent so much time being exhausted or sick or in pain, even if you were a straight white guy like me and had the best of everything.” Stefan’s voice shifted in that way it did when he was feeling particularly bitter or self-loathing. Vicki knew by now to let him talk it out on his own. “Life should be more than just survival. People were made for more than that. I know we haven’t exactly mastered the art of using all the technology at our disposal for the good of the planet or each other. But the fact that you and I can sit here and have an intelligent conversation on a Saturday morning, that we can sit here and enjoy the fall weather instead of plowing fields and canning beets - this is the kind of thing that makes me glad to be living right now.”

Vicki grinned in spite of herself. No one had ever described a conversation with her as “intelligent” before. “It helps that you can compel people into giving you whatever you need, instead of getting a job. We could sit around having intelligent conversation 24/7 if you wanted.”

Stefan turned to give her a good-natured smirk. “I don’t think I have _that_ many intelligent things to say. Which is why you should tell Bella about being a vampire. Then you’ll have a whole new person to have intelligent conversations with.”

“Alright, maybe I’ll tell her,” conceded Vicki. “I just don’t want to ruin stuff, you know? Bella’s really cool, and it’s nice to have a friend who doesn’t look at me and see my strung-out mom or my nonexistent dad, or what a screwup I was last year. It’s like I have a clean slate with her. You know what I mean?”

Stefan smiled. “I think so.”


	4. And Smell the Ocean in Your Hair

Vicki hadn’t planned on going to watch football practice that next Tuesday - if you’d asked her, she would have claimed she wasn’t even thinking about Bella all day (not true) and that going to spectate her football practice was lame and desperate (possibly true). But she had to pass by the practice field on the way to her car after school, and it wasn’t her fault football practice was still going on. Her feet seemed to slow down all on their own as she neared the field, even though she could hear her pulse pounding in her ears. _This is so stupid,_ she thought as she approached the chain-link fence, _my heart isn’t even beating anymore, so how can it be racing like this?_

Bella and the other place kicker stood at the near end of the field, talking to one of the coaches, a younger guy who had taught Vicki’s geography class her freshman year. Bella nodded seriously as the coach talked, her arms crossed over her chest and her feet slightly apart. She wore a sleeveless white t-shirt, black mesh shorts, and white cleats, and her short hair was pulled back in a tiny ponytail that stuck straight up. Vicki thought she’d never seen anyone look so adorable in her life. 

Just then Bella turned to start stretching, swinging one leg back and forth dramatically. Vicki blushed and stepped back from the fence - she hadn’t even realized she’d been clutching the chain links - but Bella saw her and waved.

“Hey! Hold up a sec!” Bella shouted and began to jog toward her. Vicki blushed even harder as several of the guys on the team turned to look. Not that Vicki had ever been a stranger at practices or games - she’d picked Matty up plenty of times before he got his own beater of a pickup truck, and of course she’d shown up to watch Tyler play whenever he’d let her. That’s why she was self-conscious around these guys - all they knew about her was that she was Matty’s wasteoid sister or Tyler’s dirty little not-so-secret. Who knew what they thought about her, or what they’d said in the locker room?

Bella was totally oblivious to this, of course, and Vicki was glad there was at least one person who didn’t have those preconceived notions about her. “Hey!” Bella said again as she neared the fence. Close up, Vicki could see the dusting of freckles across Bella’s nose. She thought she might pass out. 

“You working later?” asked Bella. Vicki loved that Bella didn’t ask what she was doing there. She acted as if Vicki showing up to watch her kick field goals was the most normal thing in the world.

“Yeah, you want to come by? I can make you nachos. They won’t be as good as the ones from your kitchen-”

“Shut up!” Bella laughed. 

“But, you know, I’ll do my best,” Vicki finished. She was laughing now too. Jesus, Bella made her feel like a kid. You are a kid, Stefan would have reminded her, but Vicki wasn’t so sure about that.

“See you then?” Bella asked.

“See you then,” Vicki agreed. Bella tilted her head to one side, still grinning ear-to-ear at Vicki, and then turned and scampered back to the practice field.

Work that night passed in a blur, to Vicki’s relief. She’d cringed inwardly when she looked up to see Jeremy hulking in the doorway, waiting to be seated, until she noticed a girl standing next to him who Vicki recognized from school. She was dressed emo, like Jeremy, with a black hoodie, denim cutoffs over fishnet stockings, and black combat boots. In a teen romcom, this girl and Jeremy would be sitting at the same cafeteria table or on the same section of the “quad” or whatever they called it at rich-kid schools. They looked like they belonged together. The hostess sat Jeremy and his mystery lady friend in Kayla’s section, so Vicki didn’t have to wait on them, and Jeremy didn’t even glance at her as she bustled past them - he couldn’t take his eyes off this new girl, and the feeling seemed to be mutual. She wasn’t exactly giggling and twirling her hair, but Vicki recognized the awkward grin and blush when Jeremy said something funny - this girl was clearly interested in him. 

Back when she’d been shuttling between Jeremy and Tyler, this was the sort of thing that would have made Vicki’s antennae perk up with jealousy. As much as she loathed Jeremy’s neediness, she’d also hated the idea of him directing that need toward anyone else. Even the idea that he might be doing this on purpose to get her attention hadn’t bothered her - she’d just wanted him to herself, in all his whiny “nice-guy” glory. But now she realized she was genuinely pleased for him that he’d found someone as smitten with him as he was with her.   
Stefan seemed to be reading her mind - she passed him at the pool table trying to square off against Damon, who’d spent a lot more time in bars during the last hundred years than Stefan and was consequently wiping the floor with him.

“Go easy on him, he’s still learning,” she hissed at him as she brought an empty iced tea pitcher back to the beverage station.

“Stefan’s mini-me! I thought you were supposed to be teaching this guy how to play pool, but he’s just as bad as last time we played,” Damon said, looking pleased to see her despite his complaint.

“That was forty years ago, Damon, and we didn’t even finish,” Stefan pointed out archly. “You snapped your cue in half and staked my partner.” 

“I’m still waiting on a ‘thank you’ for that,” Damon said, leaning over the table to line up his shot. “That guy was a ripper. He would have killed everyone in the bar.” Damon sank the nine ball and then stood up straight, stretching languorously before he circled the table to plan his next shot. Vicki’s relationship with Damon was an uneasy detente at best, but she could still admire the way he looked prowling around the pool table like a panther.

While they waited for Damon to finish clearing the table, Stefan winked at Vicki and nodded toward Jeremy’s table. “Looks like you’ve been replaced.”

“Thank god,” sighed Vicki. “He actually seems happy. I’ve never seen him like that.”

“Not exactly a glowing testimonial of your… whatever you guys were doing,” Damon tossed over his shoulder as he neatly sank another ball into the corner pocket.

“Give it a rest, Damon,” Stefan said wearily, but Vicki snorted. She was in too good a mood to rise to the bait. 

“You’re chipper,” Damon said after clearing the table and striding up to Vicki, resting the butt of the pool cue on the floor and holding the other end in both hands. His hip jutted out to one side in a mimicry of the posture they’d learned about in art history, _contrapposto_. Vicki felt a flush creeping up her neck as Damon caught her staring and smirked; whatever he was doing was on purpose, designed to throw her off balance. 

“I guess,” Vicki agreed guardedly.

“Don’t pester her, Damon,” said Stefan, stepping forward as if he might need to physically intervene.

“Let the baby vamp talk,” said Damon, spreading his palms out in a gesture of apparent goodwill. 

“It’s OK, Stefan,” Vicki said, and Stefan moved back half a step. “Damon, do you really want to talk about my mood? Am I that interesting to you?”

“You, my dear, are fascinating. Don’t sell yourself short,” Damon said, winking at Vicki. She saw right through his show of charm, which probably worked on virginal schoolgirls and lonely housewives, but she had a hard time being mad at him. She’d only been a vampire for eight months but she could already understand the impulse to turn someone just for fun, to see what might happen.

“Alright, ask away. I have an order up in two minutes so make it quick.” 

“Who’s the guy?” asked Damon, raising one eyebrow at her.

Vicki laughed. She wanted to play it cool, but it was too funny watching him punctuate the question with the dramatic eyebrow lift, as if he knew the question was going to score a point.

“Try again,” she giggled, glancing at Stefan, who was chugging his Blue Moon in an attempt to cover up his own laugh.

Damon followed her eyes. “Stefan knows about this? And it’s not a guy?” For a moment he looked genuinely puzzled and maybe a tiny bit hurt. _Good_ , Vicki thought, _you don’t know everything, Damon._

“I plead the fifth. You wanted to let her talk,” Stefan said apologetically, still not doing a very good job of hiding his smile.

“It’s not a girl, is it?” asked Damon, and when Vicki tilted her head in a coy _maybe_ gesture, Damon raised both eyebrows in genuine surprise. “It _is_ a girl, then. Baby Vamp’s expanding her palate. Good for you, seriously. No point in living forever if you’re going to keep dating the same person over and over, am I right, Stefan?”

Stefan glared at him.

“OK, we’ll skip that one for now since we’re all getting along so well, and Baby Vamp has to get back to work,” Damon said breezily. Vicki had been glancing surreptitiously at her one remaining table, a teenage couple who was apparently trying to exhaust their supply of unlimited soda refills, so she had a minute or two to kill. “It can’t be Elena or you two wouldn’t be so chummy. Not Caroline Forbes, she’s too Type A. Not the Bennett witch - I bet she waits till college to ‘experiment’ and then never does it again. They do go to Mystic Falls High, right?”

Stefan choked on his beer at the exact same moment as Vicki quickly said “yes.” 

“Wait, she does or she doesn’t? Why is my brother being weird about that question?” Damon stepped closer to Vicki and glanced around the room as if to make sure they weren’t being watched. “Are you dating a teacher, Baby Vamp? Because if you are, I will be _very_ impressed,” he whispered. 

“I’m not dating a teacher!” she hissed, still trying and failing to be mad at him. She’d forgotten how funny Damon was, when he wasn’t being a giant asshole. “I’m still only seventeen!”

“Hmph,” Damon snorted. “I think my brother is rubbing off on you. You used to be a lot more fun.”

Vicki laughed and Stefan rolled his eyes. Just then Bella walked in, still wearing her athletic shorts and maroon Mystic Falls Hoodie. God, she looked cute. She waved to Vicki and pantomimed fanning her sweaty armpits, and Vicki laughed and pointed to an empty table in her section before turning back to Stefan and Damon.

Damon grinned at her. “You just answered my question, Baby Vamp. Word of advice: never play poker.” With that he racked up the balls on the pool table. “Stefan, your break?” 

Stefan looked at Vicki helplessly. “Stefan, it’s fine, he was going to find out sooner or later anyway,” Vicki said, hoping she sounded more convincing than she felt. Stefan glowered as he leaned across the pool table and broke, sinking the five ball. Vicki could tell he was suppressing a fist pump - he hadn’t sunk a single ball on a break since the day she’d tried to teach him pool six months earlier.

She made her way over to Bella’s table, resisting the urge to glance behind her at Stefan and Damon. No sense confirming what they already knew. 

“How about those nachos?” asked Bella. “I hope I’m not too stinky. I came straight from practice.”

“Trust me, you’re not on the top ten stinkiest customers I’ve had today,” Vicki said, feeling herself smiling uncontrollably. How was Bella doing this to her? She’d never felt this _light_ before, like her soul was being carried along on a soft, buoyant cloud. Bella’s short hair clung damply to her forehead and Vicki wished she could reach across the table and brush it back from her temple.

Bella laughed. “As long as I’m not driving away your customers. You don’t mind if I study for a bit?”

Vicki shook her head, still smiling like an idiot. “I think that would be awesome. Let me go put your order in.”

Bella stayed until Vicki’s shift was over, even though Vicki could see her eyelids drooping despite the Cokes Bella chugged to stay awake. None of the other servers tried to shoo her out, and Vicki wondered again how obvious she was being. 

The two girls walked out to the nearly empty parking lot together after Vicki finished closing out her register and tidying up. Vicki instinctively steered them both toward Bella’s truck without realizing she was doing it.

“Where are you parked?” asked Bella gently. 

“Oh - right over there,” Vicki said, feeling herself blushing as she pointed. “I just wanted to make sure you got to your truck OK.”

“You sure are protective, considering I’m the one who’s on the football team,” Bella chuckled as they reached her truck and turned to face each other. “I like it though,” she continued, letting her gym bag drop to the ground and smiling meditatively. “I’m not used to feeling - feminine, I guess is the word. Like, that’s never been something I wanted or something that made me feel good. And you know, most people look at me and see the short hair and the gym clothes and they draw their own conclusions. And that’s fine. I don’t mind seeming butch.”

“You don’t?” breathed Vicki. Not that she could imagine Bella minding how she looked. But saying the word _butch_ out loud still made her heart race. She’d never considered that being butch or liking someone who was butch could be a good thing - it still had the fearful ring of a word someone whispered at you in the hallways when they wanted to wound you, the way kids had hissed the words _slut_ and _burnout_ at her before she became a vampire, and still occasionally did.

“Of course not. This is me,” Bella said, shrugging and gesturing at herself. “If people think I’m butch or that being butch is somehow bad - that’s on them. I’ve moved around a lot and the one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t lose sleep over what people think of you. Which, I know, easier said than done,” she laughed.

“Tell me about it,” agreed Vicki.

“So that’s all just to say that it’s nice having someone get all protective around me for a change,” Bella continued, ducking her head and blushing. “I don’t know if that’s what you meant to do - I’m not trying to make it weird or anything.”

Before she realized what she was doing, Vicki stepped forward and took Bella’s hand. “You’re not,” she reassured Bella. “I totally was being protective. I’m glad you don’t mind. It’s not like I think you can’t take care of yourself.”

Bella shook her head, grinning at Vicki. “I don’t mind. It’s cute. But I’m curious, what would you do if something happened? If I actually needed protecting?”

Bella was still smiling but Vicki’s heart suddenly began to race. She was suddenly aware that she could hear Bella’s pulse pounding in her neck, just under the surface of her extremely smooth-looking and sexy-smelling skin. “You might not like it,” she began cautiously.

Bella’s eyebrows shot up and she laughed. “You’d do something that intense to protect me?” Her voice was lower now, and Vicki felt herself step toward her just a hair. She couldn’t help it.

“Only if you wanted me to,” said Vicki in a near whisper; she was almost afraid to let the words out. Bella nodded gently and suddenly Vicki was rushing towards her, suddenly their arms were around each other and they were kissing each other hard, their hands tangling in each other’s hair, and then one of Bella’s hands slid down to the small of Vicki’s back and on past it, pressing firmly into Vicki’s ass, and she whimpered against Bella’s mouth.

They pulled apart slightly, their foreheads still tilted together and their breathing ragged but nearly synchronized. After a long moment of listening to each other gasp for air, Vicki said, “I hope it’s OK that I did that.”

“I think we both ‘did that,’” laughed Bella. Vicki realized Bella was a little shorter than her, now that they were pressed together, and it made her want to curl herself around the other girl and shield her from everything else in the world. What if Bella didn’t know what it could be like out there? What if she didn’t know what guys were like? Christ, what if that had been her first kiss?

“I wanted to kiss you,” added Bella, as if she’d been reading Vicki’s mind. “I still do. You didn’t… _do_ anything to me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I was, a little, to be honest,” Vicki said, shocking herself by saying what she was thinking. When had that ever worked for her in the past?

“Want to come with me? We can just talk,” Bella added, seeing what was probably the look of total dumbstruckness on Vicki’s face. “Or we can do other stuff. Or both.” Bella smiled and brushed Vicki’s hair back from her face gently. “I’ll tell you about my past, if you want to hear it. There’s not that much to tell. But this probably isn’t the best place for it,” she said, gesturing to the empty parking lot with a half-smile. 

Vicki’s heart was still pounding so loudly she was sure Bella could hear it. She wanted to go with Bella, wanted to talk to her and do all the “other stuff” they could think of, but she still didn’t trust herself to stay over with Bella without screwing everything up. If anything, Bella was in more danger from Vicki now than ever before: now that Vicki knew Bella wanted her, the only thing keeping her from skating right past the whole admitting she was a vampire thing and going straight to the sex was her own self-control, and Vicki had come a long way since becoming a vampire, but she still had her limits. 

“I can’t tonight,” she said, her heart twisting at the look of barely concealed disappointment on Bella’s face. “But let’s talk tomorrow, OK? You can tell me as much or as little as you want to about your past, and, umm… there’s a couple of things I should tell you too. Is that OK?”

“Sure,” said Bella, squeezing her hand. “Where do you want to meet?”

They needed to have this conversation ASAP, and it needed to happen in the least sexy place Vicki could think of.

“Want to go to the flea market?”


	5. Bombs Going Off in My Head

The Mystic Falls flea market was an institution on the first Saturday of every month, as a place to people-watch, shop, and gossip, so maybe it was no surprise Vicki had never had any interest in going before. She never had any real money to spend, and she was more likely to be the butt of town gossip than the recipient of any. But strolling between the stalls with Bella was a totally different experience. If she’d gone by herself or with Jeremy - or god forbid, with Tyler - that would have made the tongues wag, and even if it hadn’t, she couldn’t imagine enjoying something so ordinary with either of them. But walking side by side with Bella, their pinkie fingers occasionally linking surreptitiously, looking at the boxes of records and comics, the handmade pottery and the weird collages of NFL logos, the photorealistic oil paintings of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, and the home-canned green beans and pearl onions, the whole experience was weirdly exhilarating.

It was unseasonably cold and blustery, so Vicki had texted Bella to make sure she was still up for it (they’d exchanged numbers that night, finally, and Vicki blushed every time she saw Bella’s name come up in her text history). They could have done something indoors, of course, but Vicki was still relieved when Bella had responded right away to say she was game. She was bundled up in a black leather jacket with a gray hoodie underneath, and a slouchy knit hat perched on the back of her head. Vicki thought Bella looked absurdly cool. For herself, she’d borrowed Matty’s burgundy letterman jacket even though two of her could have fit inside it; it was still warmer than her dressy wool coat, and she didn’t want to crap out of this date early because she’d failed to bundle up adequately.

Of course, she didn’t have a ton of money to blow, but that didn’t matter; she and Bella flipped through boxes of records and giggled at the cheesy cover photos of Michael Bolton and Perry Como, then drifted to the next booth and looked through racks of vintage clothes that smelled of mothballs, or cellophane-wrapped prints of paintings of creepy clowns. Bella pulled a long green knitted scarf out of a box that was jumbled with mittens and gloves and hats, and she wound it around Vicki’s neck playfully. Vicki was so flustered she nearly walked off from the booth still wearing it; at the last minute the owner, a bald middle-aged man with tiny wire-rimmed glasses, coughed discreetly and caught her attention. She hurried over to him and pulled the scarf off to check the price tag, sighing with relief when she saw that it was only $3.

“Let me get it,” piped up Bella from behind her, and before Vicki could object, Bella handed the bald man a five and turned to grin at Vicki. “It’s more fun this way,” she explained simply. She was standing so close that Vicki could hear Bella’s blood pounding in her neck, just under her smooth pale skin. Vicki couldn’t help taking a deep breath and inhaling Bella’s scent; she’d gone hunting that morning with Stefan, and now she was extra relieved to have taken that precaution. It was hard enough keeping her hands off Bella even with a mostly full stomach.

“You hungry?” Bella asked, as if reading her mind. “I saw a corn dog stand a ways back and it smelled too good to pass up.”

“Sounds good to me,” agreed Vicki. They each got a corn dog and a lemonade, and they took them over to a picnic table nearby. 

Bella demolished her corn dog with the ravenous hunger of someone who’d gotten up early that morning to run wind sprints, and Vicki smiled wistfully, remembering when food had been that simple of a pleasure. Drinking blood was a thousand times more satisfying than eating the best meal she’d ever tasted, on a physical level; nothing she’d experienced as a human even came close. But Vicki still remembered going to the pool with Matty when they were little, swimming until their fingers were pruny and their ears full of pool water, and then getting those greasy flat little burgers they used to sell at the concession stand and inhaling them with inhuman joy. The burgers themselves had been adequate, barely; but the experience of eating together after a long day of playing was something she had to admit she missed. Her corn dog was good, and the cold lemonade was refreshing - she’d gotten sweaty in Matty’s letter jacket after all - but she envied Bella’s obvious satisfaction in being hungry and then getting full again.

“So is now a good time for the whole past relationships postmortem talk?” asked Bella. She was smiling, but Vicki could sense an undercurrent of nervousness that mirrored her own.

“We might as well,” agreed Vicki, surreptitiously scanning the area for other vampires. Not that her romantic past was classified information, but she didn’t need anyone eavesdropping on what was supposed to be a private conversation. They’d picked the table farthest away from the shoppers, so no one would overhear them unless they had superpowers.

“Want to flip a coin to see who goes first?” asked Bella. Vicki agreed and fished a quarter out of her pocket. She called tails and the quarter landed tails up.

“That means you go first,” said Bella with a mischievous grin.

“No it doesn’t! It means I get to pick who goes first, and I pick you!”

Bella shook her head, still smiling, and Vicki took a deep breath to calm her racing heart. Telling Bella about Tyler and Jeremy wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. It didn’t give her any pleasure to look back on those relationships, but she was surprised to find it didn’t really hurt to talk about them either. It helped that Bella didn’t seem shocked or disgusted by anything she said.   
Vicki paused for a breath as she was nearing the end of the Jeremy-Tyler merry-go-round, not sure how to transition from that to “and then I became a vampire.”

“So you’ve mostly dated guys, huh?” asked Bella.

“Yeah, pretty much all guys. My friend Shannon and I kissed a little in junior high, to practice making out with boys. But otherwise all guys,” Vicki answered.

“Have you ever had a crush on a girl before?” asked Bella. 

Vicki thought for a minute. She was still getting used to the idea of herself as bisexual, and she’d never stopped to think about how this might explain some of the confusing feelings she’d had toward other girls in the past. “There was a girl I used to see at the swimming pool every summer. Her name was Felicity, if you can believe that.” She glanced at Bella, who grinned and motioned for her to continue. 

“We used to race each other in the lap swimming lanes. Neither of us really knew how to swim right, like with good form. We’d just flail around, but eventually one of us would get to the end of the pool first and then the other one would like, pretend to be mad about it. You could get kicked out for dunking so we never did that, we just wrestled each other until someone yelled at us to get out of the lap lane.” Vicki grinned, remembering the way Felicity’s dark curls would escape from her braids in little fuzzy wisps near her temples, and the thrill she always got when the strap of Felicity’s bathing suit got tugged to one side, revealing the pale straw-colored skin underneath. “I never thought of it as a crush,” she said softly. “We were just kids - I haven’t been back there since I was twelve or thirteen. But I lived for those days at the pool with her. I thought I’d never seen anyone so beautiful in my life.”

“Doesn’t seem so crazy now, does it? To think about dating a girl?” Bella said with a wry smile.

“Nothing about this feels crazy,” Vicki confessed. “I know it should, you know? I never thought of myself as bi. And it’s crazy in that like, I can’t believe how awesome this is, kind of way.” Bella laughed gently. “But it all feels really natural and normal, you know?” finished Vicki.

Bella took a deep breath. “My dating history might make you feel differently, fair warning. It’s definitely not normal.”

“Wait, I have a not-normal thing to say first. I want to hear yours, but I have to get this out first, before I chicken out,” Vicki said. Bella’s forehead creased with concern, and she nodded. Vicki took a deep breath and scanned the crowd again, knowing she was being paranoid. “So, obviously you can’t tell anyone this, and I probably shouldn’t be telling you either. It could be really dangerous for me if people - if anyone else found out. But I want you to know what you’re getting into if we decide to do this, especially since it might be dangerous for you too.” 

“What is it? Are you a vampire?” asked Bella with a half-smile. Vicki let out a snort of surprise before she could stop herself.

“I know you’re joking because I was being super serious just now -” Vicki began.

“I’m not joking. Wait, are you? Did I guess right?” Bella asked.

“I don’t - I mean, technically -”

“You are! Oh, well that’s no big deal. I mean, sorry, I know it’s a big deal for you -”

“I just - I can’t get my mind around this,” Vicki began, feeling as if she was high. “How do you know about vampires? You’re not -”

“God no,” laughed Bella. “Just a regular-ass human. But my ex was a vampire. That’s what I was going to tell you earlier.”

“Your ex?” breathed Vicki. She wasn’t sure why knowing concretely about this ex of Bella’s suddenly made her so crazy. “Guy or girl?”

“Guy. His name was Edward.”

“Did you guys break up because of the move?” Vicki asked.

Bella shook her head. “We’d already broken up. And not because he was a vampire either. I mean, not directly. I think it bothered him more than it bothered me, you know?”

“Totally,” Vicki agreed.

“Like, he’s a good person and I really cared about him. But everything was always so serious with him. Sometimes I just wanted us to be able to go to a party together like a normal couple and not have to babysit him the whole time. You know? Like he didn’t really have any friends except me and all his brothers and sisters - well, it turned out they weren’t really related, they were more like vampire family, like those Anne Rice books. Anyway, I told myself they were these doom and gloom drama queens all the time because becoming a vampire must do that to you. But you don’t seem like that.” She finished with a grin and Bella smiled back, feeling dizzy as they gazed into each other’s eyes for a long beat.

“I guess not,” Vicki finally said. “I mean, I told you what I was like before. No one would have called me serious.”

“Wait, so how long have you been a vampire? Edward looked like he was sixteen but it turned out he was over a hundred.”

Vicki laughed. “Only eight months. I really am seventeen. No cradle-robbing here.”

“So who turned you into a vampire then? Anyone I know? Not that Stefan guy?’

Vicki shook her head. “No, but he is one. I guess you might as well know that too, if I’m telling all the Mystic Falls vampire secrets.”

“So who?” Bella asked.

“Remember the guy who was playing pool with Stefan at the Grill the other night?’

“The one with the eyebrows?” Bella waggled her own eyebrows up and down to demonstrate.

Vicki laughed and nodded. “That’s Stefan’s brother Damon. He turned me.”

“So were you guys…?”

“God no,” Vicki said, too quickly. Bella tilted her head to one side and looked dubious. “I mean, we hung out a couple of times, but it didn’t mean anything.”

“To you or to him?”

Vicki sighed. She should have known she couldn’t bullshit Bella. “I did like him. I was in a bad place back then - you remember all that stuff about Jeremy and Tyler? I was in the middle of all that when Stefan and Damon showed up. The hot new guys in town.” Vicki rolled her eyes at the memory.

“You don’t have to apologize for having feelings for someone, even if they didn’t deserve it,” Bella told her, putting her hand gently on Vicki’s arm. Vicki tried not to stare at Bella’s hand, but she could feel her touch searing her skin. “I’m guessing he didn’t? Deserve it, I mean.”

“Not exactly,” Vicki said wryly. “It was definitely just a distraction for him. Something to keep his mind off the girl he really wanted.”

Bella was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said at last. The tenderness in her voice tore at Vicki’s heart. She still didn’t truly believe she deserved this girl’s attention, let alone her kindness or affection. She stared at the horizon, trying to clamp down on the tears that were welling up against her will, until Bella squeezed her arm gently. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“That’s the worst of it,” Bella said with relief, finally forcing herself to meet Bella’s eyes. The kindness in them was almost too much for her to bear, and she looked away again. “Stefan found out what happened, and he took me under his wing. At first I think it was just to keep me from killing half the town out of bloodlust - he likes to fly low. He doesn’t even drink human blood.”

“Edward was the same way,” Bella nodded. It was so weird to be having this conversation with a human, like they were discussing treatments for allergies or diabetes. 

“So it was in his best interests to keep me calm and quiet and out of the public eye. But we ended up becoming friends. Totally platonic, by the way,” she added, and Bella laughed.

“Yeah, somehow I could tell you and he weren’t like, secret lovers,” she said.

“God, I know. He’s not my type at all. Of course I went for the bad-boy brother instead. Not that it would have made any difference - they’re both obsessed with Elena Gilbert. Jeremy’s older sister.”

“I think she’s in my world history class - dark hair? Kind of a goody two-shoes?”

Vicki laughed. “Totally. Although I shouldn’t make fun of her - I’ve been super boring since becoming a vampire. That’s what happens when Stefan Salvatore is your vampire Obi-Wan.”

By now the flea market was beginning to thin out, and the two girls tossed their lunch garbage and started wandering toward the parking lot. Vicki was still giddy from all the personal revelations. She’d actually told someone her big secret and they still liked her! She never wanted to let Bella out of her sight again, even though she knew that was ridiculous - they both had school, Vicki had work, Bella had football. Besides, couples weren’t supposed to spend every waking minute together, even when they were brand new. Vicki knew all that intellectually, but every time she glanced at Bella, lit up like a Renaissance painting in the golden early-evening light, she felt her face flush and her heart race in annoyingly human-like ways, and she wanted to live forever in this absolutely unbearable longing. 

They were standing in front of Vicki’s car before she realized what was going on. “Want to come over?” Bella asked softly. She turned to face Vicki and the heat in her eyes felt as if it was scorching Vicki’s skin all over. 

“Your dad?” Vicki managed to squeak out. She didn’t know why she was offering up objections instead of jumping into her car and flooring it for Bella’s house. 

“He’s scouting a game in Lawrenceville. He probably won’t be home until late. If he does come home, we’ll just do something quiet,” Bella finished with a wink. Vicki felt as if she was about to spontaneously combust. She’d been so afraid to make a move and so worried about misunderstanding what was going on between her and Bella, and now that there was no longer any room for ambiguity, her brain was short-circuiting. _Happiness, dummy,_ she reminded herself, _this is what happiness feels like._

They both jumped into their cars and booked it for Bella’s house. Vicki forced herself to follow Bella’s car - no point in getting there first. Bella was pushing the speed limits herself, Vicki noticed with a smile. 

Around the corner from Bella’s house, Vicki remembered something and felt terrible. She parked in front of Bella’s house, hoping she hadn’t screwed anything up. “Wait,” she said to Bella as they both jogged up the walk to the front door. Bella turned and gave Vicki a smile that nearly stopped Vicki’s confession in its tracks.

“What is it?” she asked, turning the key and shouldering open the door. The house was dark, so at least they could have this conversation in peace. 

“You never told me about your dating history. I derailed it by telling you I’m a vampire.”

“Sure I did,” said Bella as she headed for the fridge and pulled out two cokes. “You know, my ex Edward, the vampire. Nice guy, super serious. That whole thing.” She winked at Vicki and handed her a can.

“Right, but that can’t be everything. Is he the only guy you ever dated? Or girl?” 

They settled in on the living room sofa and Bella gave Vicki an odd look. “Would that bother you if he was?”

Vicki shook her head. “If anything, I’m jealous. Seems like you saved yourself a lot of heartache, if that’s the case.”

“That wasn’t really the goal,” Bella said softly, staring across the room at the empty fireplace. 

“Look,” Vicki said hesitantly, “I don’t want to be pushy if you don’t want to talk about it. Like, we’re here in your house, alone, and we just spent an amazing day together. I can think of plenty of other things to do right now, trust me.” Bella looked up at that and grinned at Vicki, who felt her heart relax just a fraction. “But I want to make sure you have a chance to tell me whatever it is you feel like telling me before we get any closer. I needed to tell you about being a vampire, so I wanted to give you the same space to tell me anything you think I should know, or anything you want to talk about.”

After a long pause in which Bella stared at her hands and fidgeted with her cuticles, she said, “I didn’t want to make a big deal about it.”

“About what?”

“About the fact that I’m still a virgin.” Bella finally looked Vicki in the eye. 

“Oh,” Vicki said, taken aback. She knew it wasn’t that weird to still be a virgin at age seventeen, she just hadn’t expected those words to come out of Bella’s mouth. She seemed so sophisticated compared to everyone in Mystic Falls, Vicki had assumed she’d at least been with Edward.

“Wait, so you weren’t going to tell me?” Vicki asked, trying not to sound accusatory. 

By the look on Bella’s face, she’d failed. “It’s my thing to tell or not tell,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. 

“I know, it’s just that -” Before Vicki could explain, her phone rang. 

Bella snorted in annoyance. “Go ahead and answer it,” she said, not exactly pouting but not graciously either.

“I don’t have to,” Vicki began.

“It’s probably important vampire business,” Bella said, getting up from the couch with a flounce. “I’m going to the bathroom. Answer it if you want, I don’t care.”

Vicki waited until Bella was out of the room before digging her phone out of her purse and swiping to answer it. Of course it was Stefan; hardly anyone else called her these days.

“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” she said, not bothering to keep the frustration out of her voice.

“I’m sorry, Vic, it’s important. Can you meet me by the reservoir?” Stefan sounded out of breath and panicky. Vicki was instantly on the alert.

“OK, I’m on my way. It’s not Elena?” she asked.

“No, it’s Jeremy. Hurry, please.” 

Stefan hung up. Vicki cursed inwardly. Of course Jeremy would find a way to ruin what was supposed to be her first romantic evening with Bella. Why did Stefan’s soulmate have to be the only living relative of Vicki’s most annoying and persistent ex?

Bella came out of the bathroom, looking stricken when she saw Vicki gathering up her coat and bag. “You’re leaving? Seriously?” She sounded more sad than angry, and Vicki’s heart nearly broke at the look of despair on her face. 

Before she could second-guess herself, she rushed over to Bella, cupped her face with one hand, and kissed her hard on the mouth. She could feel Bella stiffen in surprise and then almost instantly relax against her, and she felt like weeping with relief. At least everything wasn’t totally fucked, not yet.

Finally she made herself break away from the kiss, feeling lightheaded already. “I’m so sorry,” she gasped, “I have to go help Stefan sort something out. I don’t know what it is but he’d rather die than ask for help, so it must be important. I’ll see you tomorrow, OK?” 

Bella nodded, looking as dazed as Vicki felt. Vicki leaned in and snuck one more quick kiss before forcing herself to let go of Bella and run out the door and into the chilly spring night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I was trying to wrap things up here but my Plot Goblin took over! I promise a satisfactory conclusion eventually though. Thank y'all for reading! xoxo


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